The power of an 'Iron Lady'

Portrait of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. (Joe Fournier)

It's the hair I remember, or rather, the hairs. Each one just so, combed and placed, impeccably coiffed above the pearls and the immaculate powder blue suit. At 7 a.m., if you can imagine.

Downing Street had called a couple of hours earlier. The prime minister, they said, was flying back from Washington and would meet the press in the street outside No. 10 at 7 a.m. She'd be on time. So we had better be on time, too.

We were, in various states of grogginess. Margaret Thatcher, having flown all night, was perfectly dressed, briefed, prepared. Each question produced a little lecture, tight and coherent. Nothing threw her.

In a career of covering government leaders, I think Thatcher was the most impressive politician I ever saw. Not that she was always right: She definitely wasn't. Not that she left a positive legacy: In many ways she didn't. Not even that she was the most intelligent, the best read, the most intellectual, the most worldly. Thatcher was none of these things.

Instead, she knew she was a woman in a man's world, and so was always just that much faster and better prepared. She worked harder. She knew exactly what she wanted, which is always an advantage over the more nuanced.

Men who patronized her found themselves crushed in her wake. Other men, the necessary ones, were whipped into shape. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the first President Bush temporized. "This is no time to go wobbly, George," she said. And so we got the first Gulf War and Desert Storm.

If she had a weakness, it was for tall, handsome, gallant types. President Ronald Reagan treated her as though she was a lady, and she treated him as though he was intelligent. Together, they made a team.

Like Reagan, Thatcher changed her nation. I had lived in postwar London, before Thatcher came to power. The class system reigned: You were born into your class and stayed there. Trade unions rules, intended to protect workers in the Dickensian mines and mills, had created a petrified economy, overcontrolled and underfinanced, hostile to innovation, lagging far behind the Europeans across the English Channel.

Thatcher broke the unions, mercilessly. Then she broke the class system, leaving in its place — well, what? A meritocracy? A fairer society? Nothing was more unfair than the class system. But Britain today, like post-Reagan America, is one of the world's more unequal and divided nations. The class system, for all its evils, promoted noblesse oblige above and obedience below. If you're going to destroy something, you should leave something better in its place.

"There is no such thing as society," Thatcher said. Britain today is an atomized society, as exemplified by the mindless riots two years ago by alienated Brits who never said what they wanted but looted and burned to reject what they had.

In her time, Thatcher responded to criticism by saying, "the lady's not for turning." Or, "There is no alternative" — a phrase acronymed into one of her nicknames, Tina.

In the end, Thatcher, like the unions she destroyed, ossified into a caricature. There's a 10-year rule in politics: Any leader who lasts more than a decade runs out of ideas and clings to power for its own sake.

After 11 years, Thatcher, out of ideas, ended up surrounded by a little cabal, mostly her loyal husband Denis and a couple of aides. She was elected three times by voters who never liked her but knew they needed her. In the final days, she lost touch with these voters, possibly lost touch with reality.

In an embarrassing news conference in Rome, she rejected the next steps toward European unity by screaming "No! No! No!" At home, she instituted a property tax based on the number of people in a house: A rich man living alone in a mansion paid one-tenth the tax of a 10-person family crammed into a hovel next door. The glaring unfairness created riots in the streets of London.

Before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, Thatcher had spotted him as a comer and said, "We can do business together." Six years later, as their respective reigns collapsed around them, Thatcher and Gorbachev joined Bush and other leaders in Paris to sign a treaty that ended the Cold War.

Then she flew back to London, and was deposed by her own weary party, which elected a lesser person, John Major, as its leader and, hence, the new prime minister. Thatcher, brushing away an uncharacteristic tear, rode to Buckingham Palace to hand her resignations to Queen Elizabeth.

But later that afternoon, she went before Parliament for a swan song that turned into one last cry of defiance. A Labor Party heckler suggested she go to Brussels to run the much-hated European Union. "What a good idea," Thatcher laughed as the House roared. Then, "I'm enjoying this," she cried. "I'm enjoying this." And she was.

Three years later, she published her memoir and came to Chicago to promote it. I was back in Chicago by that time and the Tribune assigned me and a colleague, Jon Anderson, to interview her. On our way to the Park Hyatt hotel, we decided what questions we would ask, how we would control the interview.

We never had a chance. She ordered us to our chairs. When I asked a question, she batted it away. Anderson asked basically the same question, more suavely; she saw him coming and ignored it. We came away only with the answers to the questions she wished we had asked.

What could we do? With Thatcher, there was no alternative.

Richard C. Longworth, senior fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, was the Tribune's London-based chief European correspondent.